In reading the August newspapers, which described the mobilizations in
Europe, I was particularly struck with the emphasis which they laid upon
the splendid spirit that was overnight changing the civilian populations
into armies. At that time Turkey had not entered. the war and her political
leaders were loudly protesting their intention of maintaining a strict neutrality.
Despite these pacific statements, the occurrences in Constantinople were
almost as warlike as those that were taking place in the European capitals.
Though Turkey was at peace, her army was mobilizing, merely, we were told,
as a precautionary measure. Yet the daily scenes which I witnessed in Constantinople
bore few resemblances to those which were agitating every city of Europe.
The martial patriotism of men, and the sublime patience and sacrifice of
women, may sometimes give war an heroic aspect, but in Turkey the prospect
was one of general listlessness and misery. Day by day the miscellaneous
Ottoman hordes passed through the streets. Arabs, bootless and shoeless,
dressed in their most gaily coloured garments, with long linen bags (containing
the required five days' rations) thrown over their shoulders, shambling
in their gait and bewildered in their manner, touched shoulders with equally
dispirited Bedouins, evidently suddenly snatched from the desert.

A motley aggregation of Turks, Circassians, Greeks, Kurds, Armenians,
and Jews, showing signs of having been summarily taken from their farms
and shops, constantly jostled one another. Most were ragged and many looked
half-starved; everything about them suggested hopelessness and a cattle-like
submission to a fate which they knew that they could not avoid. There was
no joy in approaching battle, no feeling that they were sacrificing themselves
for a mighty cause; day by day they passed, the unwilling children of a
tatterdemalion empire that was making one last despairing attempt to gird
itself for action.

These wretched marchers little realized what was the power that was dragging
them from the four corners of their country. Even we of the diplomatic group
had not then clearly grasped the real situation. We learned afterward that
the signal for this mobilization had not come originally from Enver or Talaat
or the Turkish Cabinet, but from the General Staff in Berlin and its representatives
in Constantinople. Liman von Sanders and Bronssart were really directing
the complicated operation. There were unmistakable signs of German activity.
As soon as the German armies crossed the Rhine, work was begun on a mammoth
wireless station a few miles outside of Constantinople. The materials all
came from Germany by way of Rumania, and the skilled mechanics, industriously
working from daybreak to sunset, were unmistakably Germans. Of course, the
neutrality laws would have prohibited the construction of a wireless station
for a belligerent in a neutral country like Turkey; it was therefore officially
announced that a German company was building this heaven-pointing structure
for the Turkish Government and on the Sultan's own property. But this story
deceived no one. Wangenheim, the German Ambassador, spoke of it freely and
constantly as a German enterprise.

"Have you seen our wireless yet?" he would ask me. "Come
on, let's ride up there and look it over."

He proudly told me that it was the most powerful in the world---powerful
enough to catch all messages sent from the Eiffel Tower in Paris! He said
that it would put him in constant communication with Berlin. So little did
he attempt to conceal its German ownership that several times, when ordinary
telegraphic communication was suspended, he offered to let me use it to
send my telegrams.

This wireless plant was an outward symbol of the close though unacknowledged
association which then existed between Turkey and Berlin. It. took some
time to finish such an extensive station and in the interim Wangenheim was
using the apparatus on the Corcovado, a German merchant ship which
was lying in the Bosphorus opposite the German Embassy. For practical purposes,
Wangenheim had a constant telephone connection with Berlin.

German officers were almost as active as the Turks themselves in this
mobilization. They enjoyed it all immensely; indeed they gave every sign
that they were having the time of their lives. Bronssart, Humann, and Lafferts
were constantly at Enver's elbow, advising and directing the operations.
German officers were rushing through the streets every day in huge automobiles,
all requisitioned from the civilian population; they filled all the restaurants
and amusement places at night, and celebrated their joy in the situation
by consuming large quantities of champagne---also requisitioned. A particularly
spectacular and noisy figure was that of Von der Goltz Pasha. He was constantly
making a kind of vice-regal progress through the streets in a huge and madly
dashing automobile, on both sides of which flaring German eagles were painted.
A trumpeter on the front seat would blow loud, defiant blasts as the conveyance
rushed along, and woe to any one, Turk or non-Turk, who happened to get
in the way! The Germans made no attempt to conceal their conviction that
they owned this town. Just as Wangenheim had established a little Wilhelmstrasse
in his Embassy, so had the German military men established a sub-station
of the Berlin General Staff. They even brought their wives and families
from Germany; I heard Baroness Wangenheim remark that she was holding a
little court at the German Embassy.

The Germans, however, were about the only people who were enjoying this
proceeding. The requisitioning that accompanied the mobilization really
amounted to a wholesale looting of the civilian population. The Turks took
all the horses, mules, camels, sheep, cows, and other beasts that they could
lay their hands on; Enver told me that they had gathered in 150,000 animals.
They did it most unintelligently, making no provision for the continuance
of the species; thus they would leave only two cows or two mares in many
of the villages. This system of requisitioning, as I shall describe, had
the inevitable result of destroying the nation's agriculture, and ultimately
led to the starvation of hundreds of thousands of people. But the Turks,
like the Germans., thought that the war was destined to be a very short
one, and that they would quickly recuperate from the injuries which their
methods of supplying an army were causing their peasant population. The
Government showed precisely the same shamelessness and lack of intelligence
in the way that they requisitioned materials from merchants and shopmen.
These proceedings amounted to little less than conscious highwaymanship.
But practically none of these merchants were Moslems; most of them were
Christians, though there were a few Jews; and the Turkish officials therefore
not only provided the needs of their army and incidentally lined their own
pockets, but they found a religious joy in pillaging the infidel establishments.
They would enter a retail shop, take practically all the merchandise on
the shelves, and give merely a piece of paper in acknowledgment. As the
Government had never paid for the supplies which it had taken in the Italian
and Balkan wars, the merchants hardly expected that they would ever receive
anything for these latest requisitions. Afterward many who understood officialdom,
and were politically influential, did recover to the extent of 70 per cent
what became of the remaining 30 per cent. is not a secret to those who have
had experience with Turkish bureaucrats.

Thus for most of the population requisitioning simply meant financial
ruin. That the process was merely pillaging is shown by many of the materials
which the army took, ostensibly for the use of the soldiers. Thus the officers
seized all the mohair they could find; on occasion they even carried off
women's silk stockings, corsets, and baby's slippers, and I heard of one
case in which they reinforced the Turkish commissary with caviar and other
delicacies. They demanded blankets from one merchant who was a dealer in
women's underwear; because he had no such stock, they seized what he had,
and he afterward saw his appropriated goods reposing in rival establishments.
The Turks did the same thing in many other cases. The prevailing system
was to take movable property wherever available and convert it into cash;
where the money ultimately went I do not know., but that many private fortunes
were made I have little doubt. I told Enver that this ruthless method of
mobilizing and requisitioning was destroying his country. Misery and starvation
soon began to afflict the land. Out of a 4,000,000 adult male population
more than 1,500,000 were ultimately enlisted and so about a million families
were left without breadwinners, all of them in a condition of extreme destitution.
The Turkish Government paid its soldiers 25 cents a month, and gave the
families a separation allowance of $1.20 a month. As a result thousands
were dying from lack of food and many more were enfeebled by malnutrition;
I believe that the empire has lost a quarter of its Turkish population since
the war started. I asked Enver why he permitted his people to be destroyed
in this way. But sufferings like these did not distress him. He was much
impressed by his success in raising a large army with practically no money
---something, he boasted, which no other nation had ever done before. In
order to accomplish this, Enver had issued orders which stigmatized the
evasion of military service as desertion and therefore punishable with the
death penalty. He also adopted a scheme by which any Ottoman could obtain
exemption by the payment of about $190. Still Enver regarded his accomplishment
as a notable one. It was really his first taste of unlimited power and he
enjoyed the experience greatly.

That the Germans directed this mobilization is not a matter of opinion
but of proof. I need only mention that the Germans were requisitioning materials
in their own name for their own uses. I have a photographic copy of such
a requisition made by Humann, the German naval attaché, for a shipload
of oil cake. This document is dated September 29, 1914. "The lot by
the steamship Derindje which you mentioned in your letter of the
26th," this paper reads, "has been requisitioned by me for the
German Government." This clearly shows that, a month before Turkey
had entered the war, Germany was really exercising the powers of sovereignty
at Constantinople.